2 - ‘The Age of Johnson’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
‘No action in his life became him like the leaving it. His death makes a kind of era in literature. Piety and goodness will not easily find a more able defender, and it is delightful to see him set, as it were, his dying seal to the profession of his life, and to the truth of Christianity.’ So wrote Hannah More of her friend Samuel Johnson in 1785, and literary historians have generally agreed with her, even without knowing it, in calling his times ‘the Age of Johnson’. For More, Johnson's death and the era whose limits it reveals are characterised by a religious faith strongly operating in both the private and the public spheres. ‘Literature’, here, is meant as Johnson defined it in the Dictionary, ‘Learning; skill in letters’, a sense derived from the Latin that was slowly fading from use even as she wrote. The power of invention that Johnson believed to be the heart of poetry, and that would soon become the hub of literature understood as creative or imaginative writing, is not the issue. Johnson is exemplary, she thinks, by dint of the moral and religious ends to which he put his learning; and the manner of his death brings his life and writings into complete harmony.
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- Information
- Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property , pp. 39 - 69Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999